Out of curiosity, is the sidebar with the links on my blog looking weird? Or for that matter, is it even there?
I rarely check my blog at work. Call it paranoia if you will. But one time I checked and the sidebar looked...skewed. And when I checked today it didn't even appear.
The reason I ask is that it looks perfectly normal at home. But here I'm using Safari as my primary web browser and Firefox as a back-up. At work I'm forced to use the festering piece of crap that is Internet Explorer (Pleas to our IT department to let me use another browser have gone on deaf ears, alas).
So I'm wondering if my browser is looking weird in IE, basically.
This is just the latest racket I'm having with blogger. I'd like to do more with the blog in terms of how it looks. Not flashy, necessarily, but just cleaner and more attractive. But I don't have time to go and learn all the necessary HTML code. I know it's not rocket science, but really, I have a hard enough time in the run of a day to write new stuff for the blog, let alone spend the necessary hours tweaking the code.
So basically, for those in the know, is Wordpress a better option? Is the layout and stuff easier to do in Wordpress if you're not a whiz at HTML and don't have the time to learn? I've done a quick look at it seems that way, but I figure it can't hurt to ask.
Also, if I opt to head over there, would there be much of a problem transferring over what I've written in Blogger? I've written something like 400 articles on Blogger so far. They're not all works of genius, but I'd be loathed to just leave them here if I move to Wordpress.
Recommendations and suggestions would be welcomed...
9 comments:
your right sidebar is all the way down at the bottom of the page today. usually it isn't.
I'm interested in hearing the answer to this as Jeff and I would like to move to our own domain using Wordpress. Blogger is SO slow and apparently if you use Wordpress's site it is slow too.
From what I've seen of Wordpress code, it looks pretty simple to tweak.
I checked your site in IE (I hate it too)...your site has the same problem ours did. Your links are down at the bottom because the width of your tables is too wide for the screen. If you go into the code and narrow the sidebar table it'll look fine.
This guy here http://jamesbrownontheroad.wordpress.com/ changed his site from blogger to wordpress, he made some comments on his blog about the whole ordeal of transfering content from one to the other (excellent blog about Montreal by the way!).
I didn't see the sidebar on your blog since I use IE here at home again, always showed up for me when I used Firefox.
I transferred to Wordpress as blogger was constantly conking out on me. When I got there, I realised how easy it was to work with.
They limit you to a number of "themes"or skins, but you can customised them quite a bit and there are far more of them now than when I joined. I think they add another theme or two on average of once a week.
I like how easy it is to fiddle with the blogroll, customise the header and organise things without having to worry about the html. I can do html, but I don't enjoy it.
Also, Wordpress introduced an import feature (just after I moved - sigh) that allows you to switch over with little to no pain. It even imports comments.
You could try it out,leaving your blogger account intact and mirroring on Wordpress. That way, if you're not happy, you can revert back.
Incidentally, I don't find Wordpress slower, especially now that they've done all their server upgrades. They also have a timed backup save option for writing posts, which is extremely nice....
Great spam filters, too.
The one drawback I can see some folks having is that you can't use flash badged or scripts in the sidebar. But that's never been a real issue for me.
In Firefox, the blog appears fine and everything is where it is supposed to be.
On IE, towniebastard does not show properly, with the right task bar being booted to the bottom of the page. It's a formatting thing, for sure.
Since I don't use IE very much, I wouldn't have noticed.
I've been using WordPress (not wordpress.com) for years, so my opinion is biased; however, I have helped a few folks with converting from blogger.com to WordPress, including ohmenerves.com.
First, I don't use free hosting such as wordpress.com. I pay for my web-hosting because it allows more control over my website.
Second, Wordpress is open source; you can customize its code to fit your needs, if you're up to the task. It's also written to allow non-techies a relatively easy way to update their website's look via themes. You can install any amount of themes you want and switch them on-the-fly, customizing them to suit your needs. Also, there's a huge support-base for WordPress, so finding help isn't hard.
WordPress can import blogger.com posts, although I've never tried it.
Feel free to contact me (see my About page on my site) if you have any questions about it or web-hosting.
The formatting problem of the sidebar moving down is almost always because a picture you've posted is too big. It widens out the main content section, pushing the sidebar down.
I recently swapped from IE to Fox. Looks dandy to me!
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